I am really excited to share to news about a research paper in Science Advances journal that just came out today based on work done in our lab, in collaboration with two other groups at Rutgers (led by Sanghyuk Lee and Eric Lam), to understand how polysaccharide polymers are synthesized and assembled in living biological systems (a.k.a. plant cell walls). This work is the first direct visualization of how cellulose polysaccharide synthesizes and self-assembles into a dense polymer fibril network on a ‘living’ plant cell surface to form cell walls, since Robert Hooke’s first microscopic observation of ‘dead’ cell walls over 350+ years ago. See link below to read our paper in Science Advances journal.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.ads6312
There is also a press release from Rutgers, with some really nice artwork, that highlights the main findings of our study. Check it out to learn more about cell walls and how its formed due to synthesis and assembly of cellulose polymers on live plant cell surfaces!
Animations to learn more about plant cell wall biosynthesis are available on YouTube based on classical biology textbook model illustrations, however, our study shows that the process of cellulose synthesis and cell wall formation is likely much more complex than previously imagined.
This study was more than six years in the making and was highly collaborative involving biophysicists (led by Sanghyuk Lee’s group), bioengineers (led by my group), and biologists (led by Eric Lam’s group). Special thanks to my former PhD student (Dharanidaran Jayachandran) and postdoc (Mohammed Irfan) from my lab that led the critical experiments to enable this collaborative study eventually. Finally, thanks to all co-authors including Hyun Huh (as lead author), Junhong Sun, Eric Lam, and Sanghyuk Lee for their effort, and patience during all the challenges that we collectively overcame as a team, to ultimately make this amazing work possible!
This work was funded primarily by the US Department of Energy (DOE) through a DOE Bioimaging Program grant (Award No. DE-SC0019313) awarded to Lee, Chundawat, and Lam. Additionally, Chundawat was supported by the National Science Foundation Division of Chemical, Bioengineering, Environmental and Transport Systems Faculty Early Career Development grant (Award No. 1846797) to partially support development and characterization of the cellulose binding imaging protein probes. Lastly, we would like to thank the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center (GLBRC) cell wall analytical facility supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research (Award No. DE-SC0018409) for their timely support as well.